Here are some things you wouldn't know if it weren't for state and federal freedom of information laws:

• For years, Albany had a secret system to fix parking tickets, including bull's-eye window stickers issued by the city's police union that enabled officers and their friends to avoid fines.

• Dozens of current and former Albany police officers illicitly purchased machine guns in the 1990s, and records of the purchases were covered up by the city even after the guns were rounded up in 2003.

• When the oil tanker Stena Primorsk ran aground last winter just south of Albany, carrying 12 million gallons of crude oil from North Dakota, it took nearly three hours for the Coast Guard to get an aircraft above the Hudson River to confirm that the river had been spared a major spill.

• Many legislators in the Capital Region's four counties routinely file questionable, vague or even illegible time sheets claiming their part-time elected positions are really full-time jobs, qualifying them for full pensions under the state retirement system.

• New York has spent $3 billion over the past decade to litigate and settle legal claims against the state, including hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to make lawsuits filed by employees go away.

• More than 1,500 State University employees, some making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salaries, also share another $21 million in largely unseen extra compensation from SUNY's Research Foundation.

If you're a regular reader of the Times Union (and have a good memory), you already know all this. But none of it would have been exposed if our reporters hadn't been able to dig into public documents that laws require officials make available to us.

I'm reminding you of that fact today because we're at the outset of Sunshine Week, an annual observance set up by the American Society of News Editors, and because I'm worried that public support for open government laws is eroding.

It's not that people don't think watchdog reporting is important. It's that they've grown jaded by the flood of taxpayer-supported misconduct and dubious about their own power to do anything to stanch it. Yet if news organizations like ours and ordinary citizens don't have the ability to open official file cabinets and unlock computer drives, we'll never be able to shine a bright light into the dark corners of official malfeasance.

We're accustomed to having to fight to get access to the information you need. Our reporters routinely rely on open government laws to pry information from the hands of reluctant officials. In the nearly dozen years that I have been this newspaper's editor, we have gone to court many times to force governments to obey records access laws.

Sometimes judges have concluded that officials intentionally flouted the law, so they've ordered governments to pay our legal expenses. It cost Albany city taxpayers $70,000 because the administration of former Mayor Jerry Jennings covered up the parking ticket scandal. The state Legislature paid $33,000 after forcing us to go to court to unlock information about legislative "member item" grants. Our investigation of police machine gun purchases ended only after we waged a four-year court fight. We didn't get reimbursed for that.

But you can't put a price tag on the value of open government. Our democracy hinges on an informed citizenry, and good journalists take seriously their role in making government work.

"Let the people know the facts," Abraham Lincoln said in 1861, "and the country will be safe." Believing that, we work on.